Guy Walters is the author of nine books, which include four wartime thrillers and the critically acclaimed histories Hunting Evil and Berlin Games. Frustrated at the enormous amount of junk history around, Guy sees it as his personal mission to wage war on ignorance and misconceptions about the past. Guy is currently working on a new history of the Great Escape, and is also studying for his PhD at Newcastle University. His website is www.guywalters.com and is @guywalters on Twitter.

How Cambridge University is spinning the story of the Nazis in Guernsey

As someone who has written a thriller set on the Channel Islands during the Second World War, I've been fascinated to hear about the discovery of a previously unseen archive of testimonies of Guernsey inhabitants who were deported to German prison camps during the war. Unearthed by Dr Gilly Carr of Cambridge University, the testimonies were assembled by Guernsey journalist Frank Falla in order to apply for compensation from the German government during the 1960s. Falla himself had been deported for helping to run the Guernsey Underground News Service, which produced a daily news sheet that was surreptitiously distributed to islanders from May 1942 to February 1944. I wrote about the find in the comment pages of the paper last week, in which I called for a dedicated resistance memorial to be erected to those Channel Islanders who had resisted the Germans.

Dr Carr is in no doubt as the apparent importance of her find, which was handed to her by the family of Frank Falla. "In a word, the file is incredible, the contents have never been studied and we are the first people to see it since it was made," she says. "When we found out what was in it, we knew we had hit an incredibly rich seam of new historical information. Researching the resistance in the Channel Islands is still a very difficult and sensitive issue. Not everybody felt that they could afford to defy the Germans at the time and emotions still run deep. As a result, the story of these people has never been analysed in a complete or definitive way. We are the first to try, so to have this archive at our disposal is quite amazing [...] Without this archive, the real story of their brave acts and the sufferings after capture of so many would not just have been forgotten – they would never really have been publicly known about at all."

It all sounds so wonderful, doesn't it? It's a familiar news story – "Revealed: The true story of…" And perhaps Dr Carr is right, and this briefcase is as incredible and important a find as she claims it to be. It's difficult to gauge, though, as her team have not yet published their detailed research, and no experts outside her team, to my knowledge, have been granted access to it. Instead, we currently only have her word on the significance of this, in several media reports on the BBC and Channel 4.

However, from what we already know about resistance on the Channel Islands, one might be forgiven for thinking that the find may not be quite as "incredible" as Dr Carr has claimed. The identities and activities of those who resisted on Guernsey have been long known, not least because they were recorded extensively in a book written by Mr Falla himself, The Silent War, which was published over 40 years ago. Anybody who has visited the German Occupation Museum in Guernsey has also been able to see the names and faces of some of these brave men and women, and those who have read Paul Sanders' excellent The Ultimate Sacrifice and The British Channel Islands Under German Occupation 1940-45, orMadeleine Bunting's The Model Occupation(1995), will have learned of the efforts made by some Channel Islanders to resist.

The names of the Guernsey islanders whose testimonies are in the briefcase can be seen in file FO 950/765 in the National Archives in Kew, which contains the correspondence sent by Mr Falla to the Foreign Office Claims Department in the mid-1960s. In these letters, Falla requests 24 compensation forms from the Foreign Office, but doubts that all the forms "will really be needed". By November 1964, 13 islanders from Guernsey had applied for compensation through Falla and their names are listed. In another file, FO 950/767, we learn how much each individual was compensated, which was typically either £748 or £1,000.

These documents have been in the public domain for well over a decade, and have been seen by Paul Sanders, who is a member of Dr Carr's research team. The testimonies in the briefcase may radically alter our understanding of the range and level of resistance in Guernsey, but I am sceptical, and I believe they simply add valuable first-person accounts that flesh out some very well established facts. We'll have to wait to see what Dr Carr and her team publish to see if this is more like a local news story of interest to Occupation historians or is, as the Bailiff of Guernsey is quoted as saying in a Cambridge University YouTube clip on the find, material that will "astonish" people from around the world.

Ideally, the story would not have emerged until after Dr Carr and her team had published their research. But thanks to an admirable and slick piece of "impact delivery" by Cambridge, the story is being presented as though it is massive news. Intriguingly, according to Dr Carr's blog, the university strangely slapped an embargo on the story, despite the fact that it was reported in The Guernsey Press way back in July this year. However, thanks to the university's spin, the media have reported the story as if the contents of the archive will shed new light on our understanding of the occupation. The short answer is that it may, but we won't know until the material, and the research to back it, has been presented in full and been peer-reviewed. Even more absurdly, The Guernsey Press now claims that the find goes so far as to clear "claims that islanders collaborated with the Germans during the Occupation". This is, quite frankly, rubbish. Some did collaborate. That is how many resisters were caught.

So how did this situation come about? First, it's important to bear in mind that Dr Carr approaches the topic of the occupation with an agenda that perhaps affects her academic judgement. Dr Carr's family comes from Guernsey. Her mother's family endured the occupation, while seven members of her father's family were deported to civilian internment camps such as Biberach in Germany for being English-born.

However, what troubles me most is the fact that Dr Carr appears to be approaching her research with a strong political motive and bias, and her methodology therefore runs in opposition to any notion of academic disinterest. "We feel a sense of injustice that people think Channel Islanders collaborated with the Nazis during the war," Dr Carr told The Guernsey Press in July, "because we know that it isn’t true. We want to fight on behalf of Guernsey people to change the attitudes of people in the UK and beyond."

"I’m just coming in as an ‘expert’ sitting on the side of the defence [...] I feel we have an ethical duty to take a stand and once and for all, do this properly and produce real statistics and also show how these people suffered so it wasn’t in vain. If that makes people think I’m sitting in judgement on them (and that is not my intention or desire), then so be it. I’m prepared to fight on their side for recognition. I think this is the morally right thing to do with the evidence I have found."

That's not real history. That's a political agenda. Academics should do their utmost not to be parti pris, but by her own admission Dr Carr has taken a side, and even appears to dispute that there was any collaboration on Guernsey whatsoever. There's no doubt that she wishes to be a local hero, which must be nice for her. But there's more.

According to The Guernsey Press, "the team aim to carry out work to write the definitive list of Guernsey resistance heroes for a war memorial, and also to set up a tourist ‘resistance trail’ around the island. They are appealing to the Guernsey public for contributions towards the £10,000 it will cost for them to carry out their research."

Wow. So, even before they have carried out their research, Dr Carr and her team have established there is enough level of resistance to justify a "trail" and furthermore want £10,000 to "prove" what they already "know". Amazing! This is a like a scientist announcing his findings before going into a laboratory and asking for interested parties to contribute towards his research. We tend to call such scientists quacks. I'm not going to call Dr Carr a quack, but her research does smell to me a little, well, ducky. The big questions are these: Why is Cambridge University tolerating Dr Carr and a methodology apparently influenced by a political agenda? And just how comfortable are Dr Carr's hugely respected research colleagues, Dr Paul Sanders and Dr Louise Willmot, with this politicisation of their project?

The briefcase may well be an important archaeological find, but I'm immensely sceptical that it is of equal historical value. Judging by the limited amount that has actually been released to the media, and the small number of claims that Falla ended up submitting to the Foreign Office, it is doubtful that Dr Carr's discovery will dismantle the sadly prevailing myth that the Channel Islanders were a venal bunch of collaborators. The contents do not appear to suggest that the level of resistance against the Germans was any higher than we already know it to be. Even if it were, testimonies for compensation of treatment by the Germans may not be the documents to show it.

Furthermore, such testimonies should be treated with caution. As my friend Jeremy Duns points out, they need to be examined – Frank Falla took it on himself to compile these testimonies because there was no official liaison with the Foreign Office. In his memoir, he noted that it would have been better for someone to have been nominated officially to help people with their claims, "someone who knew those who were really eligible for compensation as against those who just hoped they were". The testimonies in the briefcase need to be verified for accuracy before we take them as important new findings.

This sorry tale highlights a growing problem in the worlds of academia and media. Funding bodies are putting pressure on universities to deliver "impact", and universities are therefore tempted by the big audiences that mass media provide. But the cultures of the ivory tower and Fleet Street are very different, and the media want information that is new, easily digestible and quickly available – things that academia cannot always offer. It's clear that with the case of Dr Carr and her project, research has been presented before it is complete or independently reviewed to produce a package that is attractive to the media.

In the end, the biggest loser is you, the reader and viewer, because you're being fed a load of tripe about our history to keep the news cycle happy.